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She's done. I hope she has a lot in savings, because her career is shot. It'll be years before she can even get lounge gigs in Poughkeepsie.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
British defamation laws are messy. There is a strange attitude, perpetuated mainly by the press, that the free press are noble heroes taking to task those villains in society who are beyond the law and holding politicians to account for their dastardly deeds but however true that might once have been, our press these days is just the worst.
I'm talking predominantly about newspapers. Ours are still slightly less partisan I think than newspapers in the US, but many of our journalists are lazy assholes who think they know better than everyone about everything. They flit from overpaid magazine job to overpaid magazine job hoping to get picked up by a paper sooner or later. One week they are writing about cameras, the next cars, the next computers and after that women's shoes. Whoever will let them drink expensive booze in the nicest bars on the company expense accounts.
They misinterpret, misquote, selectively edit, over-glamourise everything and basically make shit up in the hope of making the drivel they write sound more exiting than it is or should be.
Then there is the section that hounds celebrities for upstart pictures. Lets not even start on those scumbags.
For those who don't know, one of Rupert Murdoch's rags that had been around over a century got shut down forever because they were hacking voicemail accounts to get stories. Mostly it was celebrity accounts but the one that really was the final straw was where they hacked into the voicemail of a teenaged murder victim before her body had been found. Her family were told she'd been checking her messages and so they thought she was still alive somewhere, but it was just "journalists" trying to make a buck.
Anyway, there was one instance where they used our laws to good effect. One of them ran a front page headline accusing four people of murder. We all knew they were guilty, but they had been let off on a technicality or a procedural screw-up or something. They had the option to sue the paper, but they would have had to prove the accusation was untrue to win. They never did sue.
The laws really do need changing. We are the defamation equivalent of Texas for the English speaking world.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
Since a lot of her schtick is that she's a bully, and I'm sure she gets off on that, it's particularly biting that the shoe is on the other foot for a change.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
A new teaching resource has come under fire for advising British kids as young as seven to “write a letter to a terrorist” to understand their motives.
The guide, Talking About Terrorism, is aimed at helping students to understand the threat of terrorism, and attempts to explain the reasons behind terrorist acts.
“Structured in a question and answer format, ‘Talking About Terrorism: Responding to Children’s Questions’ will help teachers to face the most difficult questions children ask. Parents will also find it invaluable,” reads the book’s description.
I have no words for this.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
When former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who successfully promoted Rex Tillerson for her old job during the presidential transition, tried to reach him last month, it was an aide to his chief of staff Margaret Peterlin who called back, asking what Rice wanted to discuss.
The episode illustrates the difficulty even close allies are having reaching Tillerson, a diplomatic and political novice, as they try to help him find his footing at the State Department.
I'm curious where this is on the spectrum of "she can ****-off" and "this behooves preparation".
I actually think "what questions would you ask a terrorist" isn't a bad idea in itself, but the context it's placed in is important, and in this instance, extremely complicated.
That it's so complicated is one of the reasons I wouldn't drop it on a second grader.
When would be the proper time is an interesting question. 11 or 12 years old seems like the absolute earliest.
That was the point, a 7 y/o isn't equipped to answer such a thing, it's well beyond their "pay grade".
The book also suggests teachers a range of activities for children aged seven to 11.
Absurd.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee asked U.S. spy agencies late last year to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, engaging in the same practice that President Trump has accused the Obama administration of abusing, current and former officials said.
Who was the chair last year? Why Nunes.
A spokesman for Republicans on Nunes’s committee declined to comment on whether the panel made any requests for unmasking.
In contrast to the committee’s handful of unmasking requests, officials said the tally showed that Rice requested a single unmasking related to Trump’s activities between June and January.
President Donald Trump's executive order on ethics has been waived at least 11 times since the administration came into office in January, according to records the White House posted online Wednesday night.
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said that the waivers showed that "for the Trump White House, even its own, highly touted ethics rules are no more than an inconvenience to be waived aside if they interfere with corporate business as usual."
He said the waivers "vastly exceed the number issued in the early months of the Obama administration and — more importantly — authorize conflicts not permitted in the Obama administration, signify both the corporate takeover of the government and the Trump administration’s utter disregard for ethical standards."
The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has promised it will look into a series of undated ethics waivers that were released by the Trump administration this week and which allow White House staff to interact with former clients and employers.
Ten out of the fourteen waivers that were made available to the public late Wednesday are not signed and dated, and have led some to speculate that the White House violated ethics rules in the process. According to a report by The Washington Post, the OGE has said it will question those waivers.
“There is no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), told the New York Times earlier this week. “If you need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule.”
The White House is telling federal agencies to blow off Democratic lawmakers' oversight requests, as Republicans fear the information could be weaponized against President Donald Trump.
At meetings with top officials for various government departments this spring, Uttam Dhillon, a White House lawyer, told agencies not to cooperate with such requests from Democrats, according to Republican sources inside and outside the administration.
It appears to be a formalization of a practice that had already taken hold, as Democrats have complained that their oversight letters requesting information from agencies have gone unanswered since January, and the Trump administration has not yet explained the rationale.
One month ago, Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) and other Democrats sent a letter to the Office of Personnel Management asking for cybersecurity information after it was revealed that millions of people had their identities compromised. The letterasked questions about how cybersecurity officials were hired, and in Rice’s view, it “was not a political letter at all.”
"The answer we got back is, ‘We only speak to the chair people of committees.’ We said, ‘That's absurd, what are you talking about?’” Rice said in an interview. “I was dumbfounded at their response. I had never gotten anything like that … The administration has installed loyalists at every agency to keep tabs on what information people can get.”
At a House Appropriations hearing in May, Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) asked acting General Services Administrator Tim Horne about a briefing House Oversight Committee staffers had received from the GSA, in which they were informed that the “GSA has a new policy only to respond to Republican committee chairmen.”
“The administration has instituted a new policy that matters of oversight need to be requested by the committee chair,” Horne responded.
The Trump campaign likely did not preserve documents and communications key to the law enforcement investigation into possible collusion between President Trump's associates and the Kremlin, Politico reported Saturday.
"You’d be giving us too much credit,” the former aide told Politico. "The idea of document retention did not come up. The idea of some formal structure did not come up."
I’ve spoken to contacts in the defense business and on the Hill, and all of them say the same thing: There is no $110 billion deal. Instead, there are a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts. Many are offers that the defense industry thinks the Saudis will be interested in someday. So far nothing has been notified to the Senate for review. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arms sales wing of the Pentagon, calls them “intended sales.” None of the deals identified so far are new, all began in the Obama administration.
Gov LePage is at it again, this time claiming that a bottle deposit would destroy jobs in the alchohol industry... this despite what the actual industry says. Instead he'd rather ban the nip bottle entirely, which would impact jobs much much more. What a maroon.
May straight up said security is more important than human rights
So does the Left, every time they try to restrict the 2nd Amendment.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
May straight up said security is more important than human rights
The thing about human rights legislation is it's not there to protect terrorists from the government, it's there to protect the people from the government. Knee jerk repeals leave all of us open to government over reach.
The UK has plenty of anti terrorist legislation at the moment, just not enough police to effectively police it.
As home secretary Teresa May was also woefully incompetent at applying the existing law.
This space for Hire! Reasonable rates. Reach an audience of literally dozens!
Although it predates the Eu and was drafted by the Uk in large part, it has become conflated with the Eu and Brexit in particular.
After the recent terrorist attacks the Conservatives have discovered that the law and order card has backfired on them since they (and Theresa May in particular as Home Secretary) have cut police numbers by 20,000 in recent years and capped budgets. Unable to trot the Law and Order card out they have rounded on the EHRA as the reason why terrorists find it so easy to operate in the UK.
It was delightful to listen to Boris Johnson on the radio today lamping into Jeremy Corbyn for voting against the 2005 Anti Terrorism legislation, only to be reminded by the interviewer that he voted against it himself.
This space for Hire! Reasonable rates. Reach an audience of literally dozens!
My read is that the Human Rights Act is a bit of a boogeyman alone the lines of Trump's illegal immigrants and their drugs and raping and whatnot.
There have certainly been cases where genuine undesirables were unable to be deported because it was deemed it was a violation on their human rights- either because the country they would be deported to (i.e. Somalia) is a documented purveyor of torture, the death penalty, and general frontier justice. I believe there was another case where a bad guy's deportation was blocked because it would have broken up a family.
At the specific, there are issues. As a general, the Human Rights Act is a 'Good Thing' and protects more good guys than bad. Much like 1st Amendment in the US allows bastards to say bastardly things, but it's far and away a net positive. UKIP and Tory eurosceptics managed to make the boogeyman main stream in the referendum, and here we are.
In my opinion, May comments were a dog whistle to eurosceptics and an outright pandering based on the recent attacks.
They are here, and they were in the UK at one time, until the citizenry allowed themselves to be disarmed. One of the reasons (not the only one, of course) we don't have constant Islamic terror attacks in the USA is due to our armed citizenry. Hell, in some states as many as 1:8 adults are carrying a handgun, and that's simply too many variables for a would-be terrorist to account for.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
Federal investigators are looking into allegations that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) wife, Jane Sanders, falsified loan documents while she served as the president of Burlington College, according to multiple reports.
They are here, and they were in the UK at one time, until the citizenry allowed themselves to be disarmed. One of the reasons (not the only one, of course) we don't have constant Islamic terror attacks in the USA is due to our armed citizenry. Hell, in some states as many as 1:8 adults are carrying a handgun, and that's simply too many variables for a would-be terrorist to account for.
Meanwhile our terrorists are forced to resort to kitchen knives while yours can just buy all the guns and ammo they want. The two London attacks took twice as many attackers and twice as many attacks plus the use of two vehicles as weapons to match the fatality rate of your San Bernardino attack.
It goes in one ear and straight out the other but your armed citizenry has been and always will be a greater danger to itself (each other) and more of a hindrance to law enforcement than it has been a boon.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
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